Abstract:

Energy Systems and Power Electronics Laboratory, Purdue School of Engineering, IUPUI.
In order to pursue a perfect inverter, a new inverter technology is designed based on
SEPIC converter that can efficiently generate pure sinusoidal waveforms and operate
in a wide range of loading conditions. The groundbreaking design of the new inverter
is that, for the first time, the number of high-frequency switching-transistors is
reduced to one. By changing the switching frequency and duty cycle for the switch,
the voltage-level of the output signal will be continuously controlled to produce a
nearly pure sinusoidal waveform, and the voltage-level can reach infinity without using
any switch map in theory. In order to achieve the DC to AC conversion, inversing the
polarity and the boost operation for the output voltage are the two main problems in
the process of achieving this goal.
To proof the possibility of the new inverter technology, a research for a bipolar SEPIC
converter is firstly proposed in order to achieve the voltage polarity inversion and the
boost operation. The research basically use a diode to regulate the current direction
that goes through the load. By changing the direction of the diode, the polarity of the
output voltage can be inversed. For the boost operation, a simulation setup in Simulink
and some actual tests have been used to find out the sizes for each elements in the
circuit that can boost the output voltage of the converter to 110V at a specific
frequency and duty cycle of the only switch. The result of the research had showed
that this converter not only had the capability to provide a very wide output voltage
ranges and power levels, but also can generate output voltage and power levels for
positive and negative polarities.